One Door Away From Heaven

by Dean Koontz

  Maddoc was a leader—but only one of several—in the movement who wanted to use “cutting-edge bioethics debate and scientific research” to establish a minimum IQ necessary to lead a quality life and to be useful to society. He thought that this threshold would be “well above a Down’s syndrome IQ,” but he was quick to assure the squeamish that the establishment of a minimum IQ wasn’t intended to suggest that society should be culled of the slow-witted currently alive. Rather, it was “an exercise in clarifying our understanding of what constitutes a quality life,” toward the day when scientific advances would allow IQ to be accurately predicted in infancy.

  Yeah. Sure. And the extermination camps at Dachau and Auschwitz had never been constructed with the intention of using them, only to see if they could be built, if they were architecturally viable.

  At first, as she wandered through the bioethics websites, Micky thought this culture of death wasn’t serious. It must be a game in which participants competed to see who could be the most outrageous, who could pretend to be the most inhumanly practical, the coldest of mind and heart. Surely this was nothing more than a playful exercise in make-believe evil.

  When eventually she acknowledged that these people lived and acted on their philosophy, she felt certain that they were not taken seriously outside their lunatic tower at some far corner of academia. Instead, she soon realized they were at the center of the academic community. Most medical schools required bioethics instruction. More than thirty major universities offered degrees in bioethics. Numerous state and federal laws, crafted by bioethicists, had been enacted with the intention of making contemporary bioethics the moral and legal arbiter of whose life has value.

  The disabled are so costly, don’t you agree? And the elderly. And the weak. And the dumb. Costly, but also often disturbing to sensitive people, frequently unsightly to look at, icky to interact with, not like us. The poor dear things would be so much happier if they shuffled off; indeed, if they’ve had the temerity to be born or the bad judgment to suffer a disfiguring accident, then dying is the least that they can do if they have a proper social conscience.

  When had the world become a madhouse?

  Micky was beginning to understand her enemy.

  Preston Maddoc had seemed half threatening and half a joke.

  Not anymore. He was now pure threat. Formidable, frightening. Alien.

  Nazi Germany (in addition to trying to eradicate the Jewish people), the Soviet Union, and Mao’s China had previously solved the “social problem” posed by the weak and the imperfect, but when utilitarian bioethicists were asked if they had the stomach for such final solutions, they dodged the question by making the astonishing claim that the Nazis and their ilk killed the weak and the infirm for, as Preston put it in one interview, “all the wrong reasons.”

  Not that the killing itself was wrong, you see, but the thinking behind the Nazis’ and the Soviets’ actions was unfortunate. We wish to kill them now not out of hatred or prejudice, but because killing a disabled child makes a place for one who is whole, who will please his family more, who will be happier, who will be useful to society and increase “the total amount of happiness.” This is not the same, they say, as killing the child to make way for another who is more representative of his Volk, who is more blond, who is more likely to make his nation proud and please his Führer.

  “Give me a microscope,” Micky muttered, “and maybe in a few centuries, I’ll be able to tell the difference.”

  These people were taken seriously because they operated in the name of compassion, of ecological responsibility, and even of animal rights. Who could argue with compassion for the afflicted, with a professed intention to use natural resources wisely, with the desire to treat all animals with dignity? If the world is our Fatherland, and if it is the only world we have, and if we believe this world is fragile, then the worth of each weak child or aged grandmother must be measured against the loss of the whole world. And dare you argue then for one crippled girl?

  Maddoc and other famous American and British bioethicists—the two nations in which this madness seemed most deeply rooted—were welcomed as experts on television programs, received approving press, and counseled politicians on progressive legislation dealing with medical care. None of them could safely speak in Germany, however, where crowds jeered them and threatened them with violence. There was nothing like a holocaust to inoculate a society against such savagery.

  Micky wondered grimly if a holocaust would be required here, too, before sanity could be restored. Minute by minute, exploring the world of bioethics in general and Preston Maddoc in particular, she became increasingly afraid for her country and for the future.

  Worse awaited her discovery.

  As she did her research, the library remained bathed in bright fluorescent glare, but she felt darkness steadily rising beneath the light.

  Chapter 40

  AVOIDING THE LONG LENGTHS of open grassy aisles across which the ranks of vehicles face one another, the dog leads the boy between a motor home and a pickup with a camper shell, runs across an aisle, between two other motor homes, kicking up plumes of dust and bits of dead dry grass, thus in and around the wheel of campsites, through the area of brightly colored tents, eventually back among mechanized campers, dodging grownups and kids and a barbecue and a sunbathing woman in a lounger and a terrified Lhasa apso that squeals away from them. When Curtis at last glances back, he sees that their pursuers, if ever there were any, have given up, proving that he’s better at adventuring than he is at socializing.

  He remains mortified and shaken.

  For a while at least, he doesn’t want to leave the commotion and cover of the crowd at this contact vigil. Tonight or tomorrow, maybe he can hitch a ride with someone headed for a more populous area that will provide even better concealment, but right now this is as good as it gets, better than the lonely country road. As long as he avoids another encounter with Mr. Neary, he should be able to hang out in the meadow safely enough—assuming that Clara the smart cow doesn’t suddenly drop out of the sky and crush him to death.

  Old Yeller whimpers, sits next to a huge Fleetwood motor home, and tilts her head up in the posture of a dog howling at the moon, although no moon rides the sky this afternoon. She’s not howling, either, but searching the heavens for a plummeting cow.

  Curtis crouches beside her, scratches her ears, and explains as best he can that there’s no danger of a Holstein flattening them, whereupon she grins and leans her head into his ministering hands.

  “Curtis?”

  The boy looks up to discover that an astonishingly glamorous woman looms over him.

  Her toenails are painted azure-blue, so it seems as though they are mirrored to reflect the sky. Indeed, she’s such a magical-looking person and the color on her toenails has such lustrous depth that Curtis can easily imagine he is looking at ten mystical entry points to the sky of another world. He is half convinced that if he drops a tiny pebble on one of her toenails, it will not bounce off, but will disappear into the blue, falling through into that other sky.

  He can see her perfectly formed toes, for she wears minimalist white sandals. These have high heels made of clear acrylic, so she appears to be standing effortlessly on point, her feet as unsupported as those of a ballerina.

  In tight white toreador pants, her legs look impossibly long. Curtis is sure that this must be an illusion fostered by the woman’s dramatic appearance and by the severe angle from which he gazes up at her. When he rises from beside the dog, however, he discovers that no trick of perspective is involved. If H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, on his mysterious island, had been a success at his genetic experiments, he couldn’t have produced a human-gazelle hybrid with more elegant legs than these.

  The low-rider pants expose her tanned tummy, which serves as the taut setting for an oval-shaped, bezel-faceted opal the exact same shade of blue as the toenail polish. This gemstone is held securely in her navel by either glue or a cleverly conceale
d tension device of unimaginable design, or by sorcery.

  Her bosoms are of the size that cameras linger on in the movies, brimming the cups of a white halter top. This top is made from such thin and pliant fabric, and supported by such fine-gauge spaghetti straps—capellini straps, actually—that as a wonder of the man-made world, it rivals the Golden Gate Bridge. Scores of engineers and architects might require weeks to study and adequately analyze the design of this astonishingly supportive garment.

  Honey-gold hair frames a centerfold face with eyes that match the color of the opal. Her mouth, the ripe centerpiece of a lipstick advertisement, is a frosted red like the petals of the last rose on a November bush.

  If the boy had been Curtis Hammond for more than two days, say for two weeks or two months, he might have been so completely adapted to the human biological condition that he would have felt the stir of male interest that apparently had begun to tease the original Curtis into adding Britney Spears to the big posters of movie monsters that papered his bedroom. Nevertheless, although he’s largely still a work in progress, he undeniably feels something, a dryness of the mouth that has nothing to do with thirst, a peculiar tingle along the nerves of his limbs, and a tremble short of weakness in his knees.

  “Curtis?” she asks again.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and realizes as he speaks that he hasn’t told anyone his name since he chatted with Donella in the restaurant at the truck stop the previous evening.

  Warily she surveys their surroundings, as if to be certain they are not observed or overheard. A few men in the vicinity, staring at her while she’s focused on Curtis, look away when she turns toward them. Perhaps she notices this suspicious behavior, for she leans closer to the boy and whispers: “Curtis Hammond?”

  Except for Donella and poor dumb Burt Hooper, the waffle-eating trucker, and the man in the DRIVING MACHINE cap, no one but Curtis’s enemies could know his name.

  As defenseless as any mere mortal standing before a shining angel of death, Curtis is paralyzed in expectation of being gutted, beheaded, shredded, broken, blasted, burned, and worse, though never did he imagine that Death would arrive in dangling silver earrings, two silver-and-turquoise necklaces, three diamond rings, a silver-and-turquoise bracelet on each wrist, and navel decoration.

  He could deny that he is either the original or the current Curtis Hammond, but if this is one of the hunters that wiped out his family and Curtis’s family in Colorado two nights ago, he has already been identified by his singular energy signature. In that case, every attempt at deception will prove useless.

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s me,” he says, polite to the end, and steels himself to be slaughtered, perhaps to the delight of Mr. Neary and others whom he has offended with no intention of doing so.

  Her whisper grows yet softer. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  Resistance is as pointless as deception, for if she is one of the worse scalawags, she has the strength of ten men and the speed of a Ferrari Testarossa, so Curtis is road kill waiting to happen.

  Trembling, he says, “Dead. Yes, ma’am. I guess I am.”

  “You poor child,” she says with none of the sarcasm you might expect from a killer intending to decapitate you, but with concern.

  Surprised by her sympathy, he seizes upon this uncharacteristic suggestion of a potential for mercy, which her kind supposedly does not possess: “Ma’am, I’ll freely admit that my dog here knows too much, considering that we’ve bonded. I won’t pretend otherwise. But she can’t talk, so she can’t tell anyone what she knows. Whether my bones ought to be stripped out of this body and crushed like glass is something we’re sure to disagree about, but I sincerely believe there’s no good reason for her to be killed, too.”

  The expression that overcomes the woman is one that Curtis has learned to recognize on faces as diverse as the round physiognomy of smiling Donella and the grizzled visage of grumpy Gabby. He supposes that it implies befuddlement, even bewilderment, though not complete mystification.

  “Sweetie,” she whispers, “why do I get the feeling that some awesomely bad people must be looking for you?”

  Old Yeller has not assumed a submissive posture, but has risen to her feet. She grins at the woman in white, tail wagging with the wide sweep of expectancy, pleased to make this new acquaintance.

  “We better get you out of sight,” whispers the angel, who now seems less likely to be assigned to the Death Division. “Safer to sort this out in privacy. Come with me, okay?”

  “Okay,” Curtis agrees, because the woman has been given the Old Yeller seal of approval.

  She leads them to the door of the nearby Fleetwood American Heritage. Forty-five feet long, twelve feet high, eight to nine feet wide, the motor home is so immense and so solid in appearance that—except for its cheerful white, silver, and red paint job—it might be an armored military-command vehicle.

  In her acrylic heels, with her golden hair, the woman reminds Curtis of Cinderella, though these are sandals rather than slippers. Cinderella most likely wouldn’t have worn toreador pants, either, at least not a pair that so clearly defined the buttocks. Likewise, if Cinderella’s bosoms had been as large as these, she wouldn’t have displayed them so prominently, because she had lived in a more modest age than this. But if your fairy godmother is going to turn a pumpkin into stylish equipage to transport you to the royal ball, you want her to dispense with the mice-into-horses bit and use her magic wand to whack the pumpkin into a new Fleetwood American Heritage, which is cooler than any coach drawn by enchanted vermin.

  The instant the door is opened, the dog leaps up the steps and into the motor home, as though she has always belonged here. At the suggestion of his hostess, Curtis follows Old Yeller.

  Entry is directly into the cockpit. As he steps between the well-separated passenger’s and driver’s seats, into a lounge with flanking sofas, he hears the door shut behind him.

  Suddenly this fairy tale becomes a horror story. Looking across the lounge, into the open kitchen, Curtis sees at the sink the last person that he might expect to find there. Cinderella.

  He turns in shock, looking behind him, and Cinderella is there, as well, standing between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, smiling and even more dramatic-looking in this confined space than she had been out in the sun.

  The Cinderella at the sink is identical to the first Cinderella, from the silky honey-gold hair to the opal-blue eyes, to the opal in the navel, to the long legs in low-rider white toreador pants, to the sandals with acrylic heels, to the azure toenails.

  Clones.

  Oh, Lord, clones.

  Clones are usually trouble, and there’s no prejudice in this opinion, because most clones are born to be bad.

  “Clones,” Curtis mutters.

  The first Cinderella smiles. “What’d you say, sweetie?”

  The second Cinderella turns away from the sink and takes a step toward Curtis. She’s also smiling. And she’s holding a large knife.

  Chapter 41

  SITTING IN THE fluorescent-flooded brick-and-mortar library but also outbound through cyberspace with its infinite avenues of radiant circuitry and light pipes, traveling the world on the swift wheels of electric current and microwaves, exploring virtual libraries that are always open, ever bright, poring through paperless books of glowing data, Micky found the primitive self-interest and darkest materialism of humanity everywhere in these palaces of technological genius.

  Bioethicists reject the existence of objective truths. Preston Maddoc had written, “There is no right or wrong, no moral or immoral conduct. Bioethics is about efficiency, about establishing a set of rules that will do the most good for the most people.”

  For one thing, this efficiency means assisting suicide in every case where a suffering person considers it, not merely assisting the suicides of the terminally ill, not just of the chronically ill, but assisting even those who could be cured but are at times depressed.

  In fact, Preston an
d many others considered depressed people as candidates not only for suicide assistance but also for “positive suicide counseling” to ensure they self-destructed. After all, a depressed person has an inadequate quality of life, and even if his depression can be alleviated with drugs, he isn’t “normal” when on mood-altering medication and therefore is incapable of leading a life of quality.

  An increase in the suicide rate is, they believe, a benefit to society, for in a well-managed medical system, the organs of assisted suicides should be harvested for transplantation. Micky read many bioethicists who were gleeful at the prospect of alleviating organ shortages through managed-care suicide programs; in their enthusiasm, it was clear they would work aggressively to increase the number of suicides if given all the laws for which they relentlessly pressed.

  If we are all just meat, having no soul, then why shouldn’t some of us join together to butcher others for our benefit? There will be an immediate gain and no long-term consequences.

  Micky snatched her right hand away from the mouse, her left hand off the keyboard. To save electricity, the library was almost as warm as the day outside, but a chill slithered into her from the Internet, as though someone at a computer in Dr. Frankenstein’s castle had crossed paths with her in cyberspace, reaching out of the ether to trace her spine with a virtual finger colder than ice.

  She looked around at the other library patrons, wondering how many of them would be as shocked as she was by what she’d read, how many would be indifferent—and how many would agree with Preston Maddoc and his colleagues. She had often brooded about the fragility of life, but for the first time, she realized with sobering acuity that civilization itself was as fragile as any human being. Any of the many hells that humankind had created throughout history, in one corner of the world or another, could be recreated here—or a new hell could be built, more efficient and more thoroughly reasoned.